Grady Booch discusses the history of software engineering and explains why AI is ushering in a new golden age rather than replacing developers.
Every few decades, software engineering is declared “dead” or on the verge of being automated away. We’ve heard versions of this story before. But what if it’s just the start of a new “golden age” of a different type of software engineering, like it has been many times before?
In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined once again by Grady Booch, one of the most influential figures in the history of software engineering, to put today’s claims about AI and automation into historical context.
Grady is the co-creator of the Unified Modeling Language, author of several books and papers that have shaped modern software development, and Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM, where he focuses on embodied cognition.
Grady shares his perspective on three golden ages of computing since the 1940s, and how each emerged in response to the constraints of its time. He explains how technical limits and human factors have always shaped the systems we build, and why periods of rapid change tend to produce both real progress and inflated expectations.
He also responds to current claims that software engineering will soon be fully automated, explaining why systems thinking, human judgment, and responsibility remain central to the work, even as tools continue to evolve.
—
*Brought to you by our season partners:*
• Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. statsig.com/pragmatic
• Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review. sonarsource.com/pragmatic/?utm_medium=paid&utm_source=pragma…
• WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. workos.com/
—
*The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:*
• When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering? newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/when-ai-writes-almost-all…
• Inside a five-year-old startup’s rapid AI makeover newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-first-makeover-craft
• Software architecture with Grady Booch newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/software-architecture-wit…
• What is old is new again newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-old-is-new-again
—
*Where to find Grady Booch:*
• X: x.com/grady_booch
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gradybooch
• Website: computingthehumanexperience.com
—
*In this episode, we cover:*
() Intro
() The first golden age of software engineering
() The software crisis
() The second golden age of software engineering
() Y2K and the Dotcom crash
() Early AI
() The third golden age of software engineering
() Why software engineers will very much be needed
() Grady responds to Dario Amodei
() New skills engineers will need to succeed
() Resources for studying complex systems
() How to thrive dur
Why it's here
3 people recommend this
What people say. Recommended for its historical perspective on software engineering golden ages and how AI fits into the evolution of the craft.
L
u/LogicRaven_in r/ExperiencedDevs • Recommends
On “Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones”
AI as a tool is in early stage. The transformation of how we work starts with cost reduction ideas. The companies who realise that instead of cost reduction, AI can give them a competitive edge while they keep their current workforce will come.
Here is Kent Beck’s article on this: https://open.substack.com/pub/tidyfirst/p/the-pinhole-view-of-ai-value
Historical context on the golden ages of software development from Grady Booch: link to this video
A whole new era is about to come. Keep upskilling yourself as an engineer, not only as coder.
On “We can ship things alone that used to require a team. The senior eng muscle is more valuable, not less.”
…software is now actually viable. Products that were previously too big for a solo dev but too low-margin for a corporation can now be shipped by one person.
That isn't just moving slightly faster. It's a totally new economic floor for what we can build alone.
Fyi there are serious engineers who have breadth of experience who are saying this too: link to this video…
no it’s not useless. since you are interested listen to this podcast episode with guest Grady Booch, a prominent software engineer. You are going to love it.
He explains interesting between programming, web development and AI.
AI it’d good only at doing things that have been done many many times such as creating standard web applications. There are much more things in software engineering that writing just code, that’s the tool. and in even in that realm AI can only do one thing of the two adpects of software engineeing programming: code writing for the machine reciving instructions. it cannot do the part of code writing which is about modelling the domain, the language, which in itsel…
